David Fincher – An Observation – The “B” Movies

The movies which I would consider Fincher’s worst are The Game and Panic Room. Ironically both of these films have happy endings. There is nothing wrong with happy endings. However, in Fincher’s case there seemed to be no conviction behind the “happy ending”. The movies also happen to be the least critically successful movies Fincher has made up to this point. Both were basically considered entertaining “B” movies by critics.

Many critics probably would point to the unbelievability of The Game as the reason why it wasn’t a huge success. However, there are many movies that don’t make sense logically but still work. As I touched on in my last David Fincher post, the crucial part is to see the conviction behind the theme of the film. For a movie like It’s a Wonderful life, it does not make sense logically for the main character George Baily to run into an angel and go through life as though he was never born. However, because there was conviction behind the concept, we saw how the experience completely changed George Baily as a person and we were able to buy into the illogical concept. For The Game there seemed to be no conviction. There was just a bunch of illogical twists and turns without seeing any inner change in the main character.

Fincher seemed to be more interested in the suspense and twists of the film than he was in the arc of the main character, Nicholas (Micheal Douglas). He no doubt had fun working with the twists and suspense but in the end it was a movie he made to satisfy the audience, and there laid his greatest mistake. Fincher did not believe in the change of Nicholas, he just knew the audience wanted the character to change and have a “happy ending”. When you begin to stop relying on your own convictions and instead look to satisfy others, no matter who those others might be, you will fall flat and start to make a formulaic movie.

Both The Game and Panic Room were more like experimental films for Fincher. For The Game he wanted to see how far he could take the audience. How many twists can you make before something starts to not be believable? Some people totally bought into the many twists Fincher took the audience on. Some people, like myself, did not see the point and thus just did not care. But, I can guarantee you The Game helped prepare Fincher for his next movie Fight Club, where everything relied on Fincher getting the audience to buy into the big twist at the end of the movie.

Panic Room was more interesting to Fincher because of it’s barriers than it’s storyline. Fincher wanted to see if he could make an entire film in one location. Minus the very beginning of the film and very end, everything is shot in the house of the main character’s Meg and Sarah Altman (Jodie Foster and Kristen Stewart). We see a tremendous display of set design, camera movements, and visual effects to make this one location keep us entertained all the way through the film. However, the goal for Panic Room just like The Game, went no farther than entertaining the audience with scenes full of suspense and action.

With Fincher there was no formal film school. He needed to learn through professional experience. He started out at Industrial Light and Magic as a teen and went on to do commercials and music video’s for people like Madonna and The Rolling Stones in the late 80’s and early 90’s. Fincher’s film school was the commercials and music video’s he worked on. It is no surprise he would continue the constant testing and learning process he used in his commercials and music videos and also use it on some of his full length films. The Game and Panic Room are more accurately called experimental learning experiences than ambitious works of art. However, is a learning experience a good enough excuse for movies like The Game and Panic Room to be sub par or easily forgettable?

I have no problem with Fincher creating some average “B” movies because I can see how they have informed his other films. As I already pointed out, the sort of unbelievable twists we saw in The Game helped Fincher get ready for Fight Club. Working with limitations in Panic Room helped Fincher appreciate the great amount of locations he had at his disposal in movies like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. However, at the end of the day the movies which will stick out and are appreciated from generation to generation are not the ones with tons of twists and special effects. There will always be movies with those kind of things. What makes a movie unique is the individuality of the artists behind the film. When we make a film to satisfy someone else we begin to lose individuality. When we make a film to satisfy our own convictions, we make something which can not be copied and is truly unique.

I am sorry about that. I am getting better at catching mistakes like that but my dyslexia hinders my progress in those areas. One of the typical errors for dyslexics is using words that look and sound close to the same but mean very different things. There are usually many errors I make, like substituting “were” for “where”, “then” for “than”, and “hear” for “here, in my first few drafts of any given blog post I write. As I said I am getting better at fixing them. I will make sure I look back and fix the mistakes you pointed out. Thank you very much for checking out the post and pointing out the writing errors!